All of us have had the experience of taking the left side of our brain into the world only to encounter tough investment situations where facts just don’t answer the really important questions, like: "Should I buy Apple stock?" "Should I trust this financial adviser?" "Has the stock market hit a bottom?" "What is the implication of a news story you are reading on your portfolio?"

It may seem counter-intuitive, but the answers actually come from the right side of our brain, with its intuitive powers, and not from our analytical left side.

Intuition also provides much of the magic in our lives with those electric “Aha!” moments when we experience clarity. If this happens to you when you're considering an investment decision, it is most certainly a time to pay attention.

Unfortunately, for most people, true intuition is only realized sporadically. The real key is learning how to tap into these powers on demand and, ultimately, make better investment decisions. Here are 5 tips to access intuition for smarter investing.

1- Understand there is a method

To access our intuition we need to be able to enter a meditative state. Most folks think you need to be a mountain shaman to mediate — not true.

Proof that we all already meditate are the insights we get while exercising, doing yard work, cooking, being outdoors, showering, and so on.

Alternatively, ask yourself, "How do I rejuvenate?" Those activities are moments when we all experience a meditative state where intuition happens naturally.

These activities provide enough of a distraction to the left side of the brain that it turns off and leaves us in an ego-diminished state in which we can easily access our intuitions for smarter investing.

So, if you want insight about whether or not to buy that Apple stock, perform meditative activities. When you’re in that zone, you might get more clear insight about the overall price level of Apple or the effect of Steve Jobs’ health issues or insight into the potency of the next generation of Apple technologies. Get the picture?

2- Know the difference between an emotion and a feeling

Intuition communicates to our minds through feelings. We'll call this part of our mind the "feeling self." Think of times when you had a bad feeling about something or of those “Aha!” moments. These are feelings — not emotions.

Unfortunately, most of us don’t know how to tune into these pure intuitive sensations. Instead, we filter our feeling sensations through our preference for how things ought to be and turn our intuitive senses into the distortion of emotions.

An example would be thinking our love (an emotion) for Apple and Google as customers means that we don’t need to critically assess them as investments. Here we are emotionally biased at the outset to “like” Apple or Google. Ideally, you have a “feeling” about the two companies. For example, you might say, “Much as I love these two tech juggernauts, I feel like the best years for them are behind them.”

You see, once emotional prejudice is introduced, we are no longer experiencing our emotions, so the power of the intuitive sense is muddied or lost entirely. Instead, we end up rationalizing our intuitive feelings so that they conform to our preference: “I want to own Apple and Google because I love them as customers.”

To rectify this problem requires consciousness. To access intuition for smarter investing, we have to be able to experience things for what they are, not for what we would like for them to be.